ARTIC Mass-Painting in Anaheim, California by Emergent Tom Wiscombe

This proposal is based on creating a complex visual oscillation between two and three dimensional realms. Somewhere between the disciplines of sculpture and painting, the piece registers as a mass but also as a graphic. Loopy, spotted patterns flow over manifold surfaces, simultaneously dissolving the mass and re-establishing it. Transparent zones allow people to view deep inside the object, their gaze pulled into involutions in interior surfaces. They can see the inside of the mass-painting.

The human brain, recent neuroscience suggests, is not engaged in “seeing” space, but in actively “modelling” space1. Residing on multiple ontological levels, this project is an attempt to force the brain to hedge and guess in its “modelling” of physical reality.

ARTIC Mass-Painting

The colorful pattern language, while fanciful at first glance, is not simply a visual phenomenon. It is the result of intersecting a map of structural stresses with a painterly sensibility. The loopy mass is analysed as a composite shell structure, revealing areas of low and high stress. The resultant color-gradient map is transferred to a digital modelling environment where it is manipulated to produce certain visual effects but also broken down into layers of variable thickness and material strength. Color and pattern therefore only partially index material forces; the piece exceeds simple material expression towards something which correlates nature and culture.

ARTIC Mass-Painting

Finally, layers of super-thin technology are embedded into the structurally sedimented fiber composite shell. Thin film solar tape is tucked beneath the outermost layer of the shell, while organic LED (OLED) lighting film is embedded on the inside of the shell, in accent layers. The solar tape creates micro-patterning which breaks down large surfaces and generates energy to power the lighting system. At night, mysterious graphic and silhouette effects are produced, heightening the dimensional play of the piece.